The Wahkiakum County Eagle - Established as The Skamokawa Eagle in 1891

To The Eagle:

Many who spoke against the proposed National Heritage Area recently evoked the county’s pioneer origins and tradition of self-sufficiency. Indeed, our area developed largely without outside help for much of its history (notwithstanding SR4 and the Puget Island Bridge, two seminal infrastructure projects built with federal money). Yet the image of Wahkiakum as a can-do frontier outpost is decades out of date.

Consider two income profiles: back in 1969, according to U.S. Department of Commerce data, earned income made up 79 percent of the total income Wahkiakum County residents received that year, with transfer payments and property income at just 9 and 12 percent, respectively. By 2008, wages were less than half of our income (48 percent), while transfer payments had ballooned to 28 percent, and investment income to 24 percent. That same year wages accounted for 67 percent of total U.S. household income, with transfer payments at 15 percent.

That data set illustrates a frightening fact: In just 40 years, Wahkiakum has fallen from fully-employed economic dynamo into the ranks of the country’s welfare economies.

Transfer payments include everything from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to unemployment benefits, food stamps and free-or-reduced lunch programs at area schools. Property income is mainly rents and dividends from the stock-and-bond portfolios retirees bring with them into our community. The irony is that we now rely heavily on the very institutions some of us love to vilify – the government and banks – for the majority of the money that flows into our wallets every month. And that’s not because we’re a county of freeloaders, but because poverty, unemployment and destitution are the reality for too many of our own.

If we set ideology and all political axes aside, most of us would agree that what’s disappearing in Wahkiakum isn’t private property but the private sector. Jobs (and not public ones) are the economic equivalent of an endangered species here, and unless we reverse the decline earned income could collapse. Revitalizing commerce and improving our county’s income profile over time should be the crux of any discussion about the economy, but seldom is the debate framed in those terms.

There is no quick fix, silver bullet, pat answer or sweeping change capable of reversing Wahkiakum’s fortunes overnight. Slogans like “get government off our backs” ring hollow in a county with low taxes and high dependency on transfer payments (truth be told, taxpayers in places like Seattle and Vancouver subsidize the lifestyles of Wahkiakum and other counties that are net recipients of tax dollars). Rolling back environmental legislation to allow unfettered clear-cutting, waterfront development or commercial fishing would impact employment only marginally but risk further resource degradation. That, or unsavory big projects promoted from outside – LNG, prison construction, etc.— could also inadvertently reduce the county’s attractiveness to what has become our fallback source of population growth: transplants of retirement age.

What might work is a bundle of coordinated public policies, community campaigns and private initiatives that do the following: 1) lower the cost of entry for new businesses, 2) welcome not just retirees, but mid-career telecommuters, 3) make our community more attractive to young families by improving local schools, parks, pathways, etc. 4) promote tourism to give local businesses a bigger summertime income boost, and 5) encourage residents to spend more of their incomes here rather than at big-box stores like Walmart or Costco. One key prerequisite: deft political leadership at the city and county levels.

And yes, “heritage” is part of the equation, too. People well-versed in local history are less likely to vote with their feet and spend all their income outside the county. Old-timers appreciate how the county’s future hinges on Cathlamet regaining its former vitality because they remember the ice cream shops, retail outlets, restaurants and dime stores of their youth – and truly lament their disappearance from Main Street Unfortunately, the ranks of old-timers are thinning by the day: Wahkiakum’s birthrate is just 6.9 per thousand, or about half the current death rate. Newcomers make up the difference, but unlike locals they must learn to appreciate the relationship between town and county (I know because I’ve done so). Unless we convey it to them, we run the risk of becoming Longview’s most distant bedroom community.

Sadly, few took seriously NHA backer ShoreBank’s proposed revolving loan fund as a means to spur private business creation and promote local heritage. Instead, the shrillest critics branded it a “secret plan” hatched by “carpetbaggers” to steal land or paint area barns pink. False claims were also made that the NHA would usher in new zoning ordinances by drawing restrictive boundaries around the area being proposed.

That was never the NHA’s intention, of course. But the risk of redistricting is real – and larger now that the NHA plan has foundered. Because unless Wahkiakum’s income profile improves steadily over time, the logical outcome is slow economic shrinkage and ceaseless pressure to eliminate fire districts, PUD districts, EMS programs, port authorities, school districts, etc. Ultimately, that leads to Wahkiakum County itself being viewed from Olympia as “too-small-to-survive,” raising the political imperative of a forced merger with Cowlitz and/or Pacific that we’d be powerless to resist.

The alternative: a smart strategy to lift Wahkiakum off the welfare list. And to work it must be practical, sincere and free of ideological blinders.

George Wehrfritz

Cathlamet